Space 1979 Apocalypse How 1: The one with the truck apocalypse

 

Title: Maximum Overdrive

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Downright Decent! (4/5)

 

In planning out the last month, something I had in mind in advance was that I would have an extra week in the cycle. To round things out, I already had an idea in mind to fill the gap. The theme will be the apocalypse, and it’s a subject where my thinking goes off the beaten path. To me, apocalyptic fantasy isn’t just about the end of civilization or the human species, which have been covered plenty here already, but the reversal or collapse of the order of the world as we know it. Given this frame of reference, I’ve already semi-seriously mentioned a few that don’t fit the usual post-apocalyptic mold, like Killer Klowns From Outer Space and Squirm, and now I’m coming back with a few more I considered for a very long time. To start the lineup, I’m going with what is already the most iconic and egregious example, from the year that continues to mock me, 1986. And there’s no better introduction to Maximum Overdrive, a movie by Stephen King with Lisa Simpson.

Our story begins with a view of the Earth from space, shrouded in a green glow that a text crawl tells us is the tail of a comet. We then see the beginning of a seeming rebellion of machines, from profane LED signs to a lethal-slapstick pileup triggered by a bridge that raises itself. It quickly becomes clear that the spearhead of the rebellion are trucks that happily slaughter humans. That brings us to ground zero at a truckstop where our hero Bill works for a drawling redneck boss. As the trucks move in, he helps several bystanders to safety, including a lady hitchhiker who takes a shine to him. But as the onslaught continues, it becomes clear that the machines still need humans- as slaves! Can the humans turn the tables, or is their fate to pump gas until they drop? And I had a joke about how the director put a lame happy-ending text crawl at the end, admitted he had no idea what he was doing and then turned things around by writing Misery, but do we really need it???

Maximum Overdrive was the first and only film written and directed by Stephen King, based on his short story Trucks. The production was backed by chronic offender Dino DeLaurentiis (see Flash Gordon and Transformers), who previously produced The Dead Zone and Firestarter. The movie starred Emilio Estevez as Bill, Laura Harrington as his love interest and Pat Hingle as the presumably racist boss, with a supporting cast that included Yeardley Smith and African-American character actor Frankie Faison. The soundtrack heavily used the music of AC/DC, including the original song “Who Made Who?” The movie was plagued by production difficulties, including an accident that maimed cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi, as well as further censorship imposed by the MPAA. The movie was considered a box office bomb, earning a box office of no more than $7 million against a $9M budget and receiving Razzies for King and Estevez. King admitted being unable to handle his duties and further struggling with substance abuse throughout filming. It has long since become a “cult” hit on home video. It received a Blu Ray release in 2018, and is also available for streaming. The original story was adapted again for TV in 1997, simply as Trucks.

For my personal experiences, the story this one was based on was nothing less than the reason I started reading King at all. It’s a striking blend of horror and science fiction with a side of urban fantasy, with an “open” ending that only makes it more crushingly bleak. A year or so later, I found the 1997 movie, which I liked at the time and would still like to review sooner or later. It was a little later that I finally found the motherlode with Maximum Overdrive. Since then, I have not only watched it regularly but bought it and traded it back at least once before I finally bought it digitally. During that time, I have always liked it, while remaining very aware of its flaws. To me, watching it is like watching a court jester duel a seasoned knight and hold his own just by doing things a sensible professional would never think to prepare for. You could cover the vast majority of the running time with what it does “wrong”, yet there is very little that one could honestly say doesn’t “work” on the film’s own frequently warped terms. To me, the only things that really stand out are the goblin-faced central truck, which is far less frightening than the plain, grimy monstrosity of Duel, and the AC/DC score, which seems arranged to support the thesis that the band not only made the same album over and over again but the same song.

Meanwhile, the obvious pluses come in play with the very strong opening act, tellingly well before we see much of the “main” characters. Like much of the movie, it’s hit-or-miss, but the multiple inventive scenarios keep the law of averages in its favor. Things slow down a bit as the story settles on the truck stop, with the livelier moments coming from the side misadventures of Smith and her beau and a kid. Admittedly, the plot and pacing start to get strained once we get closest to the events of the original story. Still, there are plenty of good moments from the humans as well as machines, first and foremost from Hingle (nobody’s onscreen names matter) as he fights back with an actual bazooka. (On the other hand, is there an explosion in this movie they did right?) A good word is in order for Smith, who does the literal scream-queen bit to the hilt if you can get past her career-burying success on The Simpsons. Then Emilio Estevez actually finds his own facing down the trucks even as he does their bidding, like a cheeky waiter at a billionaires’ club. One more element worth mentioning is the arc of an ill-fated waitress, played by Ellen McElduff. She begins to snap when she literally screams at the trucks. The attack that follows is almost lazy, but the truly unnerving part comes as the rest of the trucks blare their horns in unison.

The obvious “problem” in all this is that there is simply no room in the story for an ending, happy or otherwise. On consideration, this is a recurring issue with King adaptations, conspicuously The Mist (one more I haven’t figured out a way to get to). It was understandable that King went for a more conventional resolution through an “escape” arc. It even works up to a point, complete one more creative highlight as the fugitives run into a restaurant’s talkative sound system. On consideration, what “should” have happened was for the characters disappear moderately hopefully into the distance on the vein of The Birds or Dawn of the Dead (in my opinion also what should have been done in The Mist). Indeed, that is more or less what we see, right up to the laughably cheery end crawl that completely short-circuits the internal logic of the storyline and fails even harder trying to be funny. We already saw the kid’s little league team get slaughtered by a vending machine (seriously…), but we’re supposed to believe an armed “weather satellite” stayed on our side?

That brings me to the “one scene”, and I suppose it’s one I might have forgotten without a viewing, if only because it’s the kind of thing the movie tends to break up. As the first act winds down, we come back to the kid, riding his bike through a residential street. At first, things seem quiet, even “normal”, apart from a few sprinklers that start and then stop for no obvious reason. We then begin to see the first of a series of bodies, while a radio warns of machines “operating by themselves or under the direction of some agency we don’t understand”. The kid proceeds to pass a wrecked VW (perhaps an homage to the story), a woman strangled by her hair dryer and even a dog apparently killed by a kamikaze remote control car. The radio further warns to unplug all appliances, grimly intoning that no machine can be trusted. (But of course you can trust us…) The kid reaches a cross street, and there’s a moment of silence. Then we hear… the ice cream truck.

In closing, I come as usual to the rating. Going in, I semi-seriously considered giving this movie the highest rating. Unfortunately, this is one where a repeat viewing never does any favors, a point that got driven home hard enough that I might have lowered the rating further than I did. I held the line where I have both for what the movie achieves and how much it had against it. It’s not great, it’s not good, but it’s still not the worst King adaptation, never mind a “worst” movie. My best further explanation is comparison with War of the Planets, the actual worst movie I’ve reviewed (though, dear Logos, still not the worst I’ve considered reviewing). I called that joyless mess the “anti-Italian” movie; this is the Italian movie on steroids. This is the kind of movie that screams, you can have CGI, big name stars, and a director with the faintest idea what he’s doing, but it still won’t be as memorable and as flat-out entertaining as this. With that, I am done and happy for it.

Image credit Happy Otter.